The fall of Kabul and final takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban.

I’ve been watching the news day by day, remembering the good people and quick-witted students I knew when I lived and taught in Afghanistan years ago. I think of the young women, my bright-faced students, curious, eager for education, so ready to learn and to be a part of what was then, a country with possibilities for both women and men.

The young Afghan women of today, unlike the young women I taught and unlike the
women of the last 20 years, are now scrambling to find a way to safety, a way to escape being forced brides of Taliban fighters, a way to hide the fact that they are journalists or fashion designers, a way to protect the businesses they worked so hard to build. All Afghan women today see their freedom fading: freedom to simply walk in the street on an errand without a chadri or escort, freedom to study, freedom to have a say in who they marry, to express themselves openly… The list goes on.

I don’t have a Pollyanna memory of the year and a half I lived in Afghanistan. There
were terrible problems, terrible injustices (as in every country) but there was also social action, education for girls and boys, and the freedom to be citizens of the 20th century. And I haven’t forgotten that the Taliban takeover will be difficult and dangerous for many Afghan men as well, especially for any Afghan still in country who worked with the U.S. and its allies.

I’m thinking too of the U.S. and allied families that have experienced the death of their
children thousands of miles from home. All families: U.S., Allied, and Afghan, that have lost children have undergone one of the hardest losses possible — add to that the grief of those families whose children came home alive but mangled and broken, never the same.  Are they feeling their children died or were injured in vain? Will they eat bitterness the rest of their lives?

What a travesty of friendship on the part of the West this too hasty and ill-planned
withdrawal has been. Bitterness and grief floods the blood stream. Maybe we had to leave; but it’s the way we left and it’s our government’s naïveté about the Taliban (to put the decision in the best light).

Circumstances: memories of the Afghan women and men, those good people I once
knew, and my personal knowledge of losing a child juxtapose in the anguish of what humans can do to each other.

Joseph Campbell once said, “One way or another, we all have to find what best fosters
the flowering of humanity in this contemporary life and dedicate ourselves to that.”

It feels like we’re searching for those possibilities in a darkening room.